On Mondays during the NHL lockout, Sporting News will present radical—and, in most cases improbable—proposals designed to get the league back on track and ensure its long-term health. The seventh in that series: using existing teams to form the backbone of a "rebel league."

One idea that has floated around in many a hockey fan’s mind during the NHL lockout has been that, with so many players heading to Europe for alternative employment, it sure would be great if some of them could stick around North America and form a new league.

The pitfalls of a “rebel league” are obvious, starting with the difficulty of finding places to play in the major markets necessary for success, continuing with finding enough well-heeled owners to afford the talent to make it a worthwhile endeavor, and going right on through to dealing with antitrust laws.

Any proposal with any kind of thought behind it acknowledges not only these challenges, but the overwhelming odds of failure. It’s a bad investment, and the people with enough money and sense to make such an endeavor anything short of a joke know that, which is why it didn’t happen in 2004, and won’t happen now. The very existence of the NHL, even in a lockout, is too big of a hurdle to clear.

Instead of dreaming of a league that starts from scratch, even though it would be fun to see all the new hockey teams—Boston Blades! Montreal Olympiques! British Columbia Explorers!—why not move forward with a new league of existing teams?

There are 30 teams in the NHL, some successful, some not. Eight years ago, all of them went out of business for a full season, then came back confident that the league’s problems were solved. Now, here we are again, with a very real possibility of another lost season, and no guarantee that once the current dispute is settled, the same thing won’t happen again.

It’s an oversimplification to say that the common denominator of the three NHL lockouts, in 1994, 2004, and now, is Gary Bettman. The problem is not the commissioner himself; it’s the very nature of his job, trying to represent the common interests of his 30 bosses. Those common interests—paying current players as little as they possibly can; staging a draft to “ensure competitive balance” and pay new players less than they'd make on an open market; making as much money as possible from national television and sponsorship deals—all feature the same word: money.

This should come as no surprise. It’s always about the money. What the owners have to ask themselves is this: Is the existence of the NHL good or bad for the ultimate goal of maximizing profits?

Let’s say you’re the Toronto Maple Leafs. Despite the longest playoff drought of any member team, you are the cash kings of the NHL, with Forbes reporting that you not only made $81.8 million for the 2010-11 season, but raked in more than $400 million over a six-year span. Again, that’s without selling a single playoff ticket.

As good as things are financially for the Maple Leafs, they could be much better. The club had to pay $20 million in revenue sharing last season to prop up weaker franchises, and now can’t even get on the ice. Since the fall of 2004, the NHL has canceled 14 percent of the Leafs’ games (and everyone else’s). If this season never gets off the ground, that figure will be 22 percent. For a veritable mint of a hockey team in Toronto, the prospect of losing nearly a quarter of its opportunities to open the arena doors—and the PR damage control that accompanies labor strife—should be unacceptable.

Now, let’s say you’re the Nashville Predators. You’ve had some success on the ice, and you’ve worked hard to build a devoted fan base in a non-traditional market, but you have a tough time making ends meet. During the six-year span in which the Maple Leafs made more than $400 million, you lost $30.5 million. While the Predators have worked hard to make their business a winner, and revenue-sharing payments help somewhat, it kind of defeats the purpose when the Philadelphia Flyers come along and sign your franchise player to an offer sheet that’s loaded up front with signing bonus money that still has to be paid during a lockout engineered by the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers.

For those who would argue that if things were so bad, the Predators should have just let Shea Weber walk as a free agent, there are two important counterpoints. First, losing Weber after already having lost Ryan Suter to the Minnesota Wild (and that team’s equally hawkish owner) would have meant the end of the Predators as a relevant NHL franchise. Good luck running a successful business that way.

Second, even if Weber had left, the Predators still would have had to claw their way to the salary floor. If they were going to overpay somebody, it might as well be the best defenseman in hockey. Ideally, though, the Predators would be able to construct their team with a salary structure that would allow them to be simultaneously competitive and profitable. It would be a challenge, sure, but not one that general manager David Poile would be incapable of meeting.

What’s good for the Maple Leafs is generally not good for the Predators, and vice versa. What they have in common from a business standpoint is being put in a worse financial position because of the lockout. By shutting down, the NHL is actively blocking clubs at opposite ends of the economic spectrum from achieving their chief (and just about only) shared objective.

If the problem with the NHL is the NHL, why not get rid of the NHL? Team owners did not get the money to become team owners by having their business practices dictated to them by their competitors, and it does not have to be that way in the hockey industry. In the rest of the world, in fact, it isn’t that way.

“The biggest structural difference between the way (European) leagues are run compared to the NHL is that the clubs—especially the big and wealthy ones—are the ones with the power,” Szymon Szemberg of the International Ice Hockey Federation told Sporting News. “The ‘league’ more or less is the office which is administrating things like refs, central sponsorships, schedule, etc. The league has no ideological say, this ‘power’ is with the clubs. In the NHL it seems to be the other way around, the clubs are franchises of the league and the league, and its commissioner, are very powerful and they speak on behalf of the clubs and the league.”

While small-market teams of the NHL would be unhappy about ceding power to the “big and wealthy” clubs, the truth is that the league already is run by a select few teams. Because it takes a three-quarters vote of owners to ratify a CBA, a group of eight hardliners is capable of shutting down the league to further their own interests. Because the monolithic NHL does not allow its employees to make public comments about the labor situation, we do not know and cannot know how many of the 30 owners beyond the necessary eight are in favor of continuing the lockout.

But you can also bet that if 22 teams decided to basically secede from the NHL and operate as independent businesses, and poached a couple of folks from NHL headquarters to handle officiating, scheduling, national sponsorships, and the like, the remaining eight would not want to be left watching as their players and fans defected.

Szemberg called it “theoretically possible” for USA Hockey and Hockey Canada to step in and run a league, but doing so would be a monumental challenge and would likely cause problems of its own with clashes between those two organizations. Instead, it would make sense for the NHL itself to continue on as a streamlined entity, using the smart and well-qualified officials already in place to carry out the tasks of running and marketing a hockey league. Modifying the existing NHL is a much easier proposition than blowing it up and starting from scratch, or forming entirely new teams for a new league, but if you want to see a “rebel league” shake up the hockey world, the best way to do it would be for the rebels to come from within.